Wednesday, March 23, 2016
Famed French ace Georges Guynemer entered World War I as a mechanic before getting his pilot’s license and first taking to the skies in June 1915. Guynemer downed German aircraft at an impressive rate over the next year, and soon established himself as the most feared pilot in France’s famed N.3 squadron, known as the “storks.” All the while, he used his mechanical know-how to make technical improvements to his aircraft. One particularly audacious creation was the so-called “avion magique,” a specially designed Spad XII fighter that sported a 37mm single shot cannon. The cannon was so strong that Guynemer risked crashing his plane simply by firing it, but he managed to use the experimental machine to claim at least two victories.
Though known for his uncompromising approach to combat, Guynemer also embodied the myth of the chivalrous pilot. During a famous June 1917 episode, he engaged in a lengthy dogfight with Ernst Udet, a top German ace. As each man twisted his machine through the sky in an attempt to gain the upper hand, Udet discovered that the guns on his plane had become hopelessly jammed. The German was certain he would be killed, but to his surprise, Guynemer simply acknowledged his plight with a wave of his hand and flew off. Like Udet, Guynemer also had his fair share of close calls—he survived seven plane crashes—but his luck finally ran out on September 11, 1917, when he was shot down and killed during a mission over Belgium. He would end the war with 54 enemy planes on his score sheet—second best in the nation after France’s “ace of aces,” Rene Fonck.
The British called him the “Red Knight”; the French, the “Diable Rouge” (the “Red Devil”); but German pilot Manfred von Richthofen is best remembered by the immortal sobriquet the “Red Baron.” Born into a family of Prussian nobles in 1892, Richthofen began World War I as a cavalry officer before making the switch to the German air service. He scored his first kill in September 1916, and went on to down an astonishing 79 more aircraft by April 1918—more than any other pilot during World War I. As his reputation grew, Richthofen painted his Fokker tri-plane a gaudy shade of red. The move earned the Baron his famous nickname, and his squadron became known as the “Flying Circus” for their mobility and their easily recognizable colors.
A consummate tactician, Richthofen typically kept his squadron in a tight formation and employed superior numbers and surprise to overpower his enemies. One of his favorite tactics involved using his wingmen to distract his adversaries before swooping in from above and delivering a punishing barrage of machine gun fire. The Baron often claimed pieces of his downed enemies’ planes as trophies, and he even commissioned a set of silver cups to commemorate the date of each of his kills. Like so many of the war’s greatest pilots, Richthofen’s career ended with the grave when he was mortally wounded over the Somme River in April 1918. His body was recovered by Allied forces and later buried with full military honors. In a display of respect for the war’s most famous pilot, the Baron’s former enemies laid a wreath on his casket that included an inscription to “our gallant and worthy foe.”
Mr Werner Voss
Werner Voss
The Red Baron is remembered as Germany’s king of the skies during World War I, but Werner Voss may have been his closest competitor. Voss entered the war in 1914 at the age of 17, and served as a cavalryman before transferring to the air service and being placed in the same squadron as the Baron. He quickly won fame for his acrobatic flying style and deadly accuracy in combat, eventually amassing a total of 48 aerial victories and winning the “Pour le Merite,” Germany’s highest military honor during World War I. The young airman had a flair for the dramatic, and routinely landed next to his downed adversaries’ planes to claim a souvenir from the wreckage. When his defeated enemies were captured alive, Voss would sometimes pay them a visit to drop off some cigars or even an autographed photo of himself. Voss is most famous for his final flight on September 23, 1917. In what is often called the greatest dogfight of the war, he singlehandedly engaged seven British pilots—all of them experienced aces—over Belgium. Though severely outnumbered, Voss spent a full ten minutes flying circles around his opponents and dancing between machine gun tracers, eventually forcing three of the British planes out of the fight before finally being shot down and killed. James McCudden, one of the British pilots, would later describe the 20-year-old Voss as “the bravest German airman whom it has been my privilege to see fight.”Mr William Bishop
William Bishop
Canadian pilots racked up an impressive record during World War I, but none was as prolific as William Bishop, who scored an amazing 72 aerial victories. Bishop began the war as a cavalryman, but soon grew tired of the mud and misery of trench warfare and transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. He went on to down a German plane in his very first dogfight in March 1917, and was designated an “ace” pilot after he bagged five targets in his first few days on the job. As his kills continued to pile up, German pilots dubbed Bishop “Hell’s Handmaiden.”
While not an expert at aerial acrobatics, Bishop possessed uncanny positional awareness and an eye for marksmanship. To hone his skills, he often dropped tin cans from his cockpit and used them for target practice as he dove to earth. Bishop preferred flying alone, and gained a reputation for his larger-than-life feats of courage. In one famous June 1917 solo attack on a German aerodrome, he supposedly destroyed three enemy planes in the air and several more on the ground. Worried his reckless style would get him killed and affect morale on the home front, Bishop’s superiors eventually removed him from combat duty in June 1918.
Mr Albert Ball
Mr
Albert Ball
Though his kill count of 44 fell short of many of his countrymen, flying ace Albert Ball was arguably the British Empire’s most beloved fighter pilot during World War I. Renowned for his quiet demeanor—he supposedly loved gardening and lived alone in a small shack adjacent to his airplane hangar—Ball also had a ferocious fighting spirit. He often fought until his machine was riddled with enemy gunfire, and his do-or-die attitude established him as a wartime celebrity in the United Kingdom. Ball usually took to the skies on solo patrol, stalking German reconnaissance planes and engaging fighter squadrons even when severely outnumbered. One of his favorite maneuvers involved slotting in beneath his enemy and using the tilting machine gun on his French-made Nieuport fighter to fire on them from below. Despite his gallant reputation, Ball was deeply troubled by the violence of combat and often wrestled with depression. The stress of war may have played a role in his demise in May 1917, when he mysteriously crashed while tangling with planes from the Red Baron’s “Flying Circus.” At the time of his death, he was only 20 years old.Eddie Rickenbacker
Eddie Rickenbacker
Lifelong daredevil Eddie Rickenbacker entered World War I as one of the United States’ top racecar drivers, having competed in the first Indianapolis 500 and set land speed records at Daytona. After a stint as a chauffeur on General John J. Pershing’s staff, he talked his way into the newly formed U.S. Army Air Service before getting his wings in early 1918. Though alienated from his more genteel squadron-mates by his working class background and advanced age—at 27, he was two years older than the age limit for pilots—Rickenbacker proved a natural in the cockpit. He was known for inching perilously close to his quarry before firing his guns, and often took seemingly suicidal risks in combat. He won the Medal of Honor for one September 1918 incident in which he singlehandedly engaged a flight of seven German aircraft and managed to bag two before making a miraculous getaway. Rickenbacker ended the war as America’s “ace of aces” with a total of 26 victories to his name—18 of which came in the span of only 48 days. He continued to cheat death in his later years by surviving a pair of horrific plane crashes in 1941 and 1942, the second of which left him adrift in the Pacific for 22 days.Mr Manfred von Richthofen
Manfred von Richthofen
America’s second-highest bridge now reroutes traffic from the top of the dam.
America’s second-highest bridge now reroutes traffic from the top of the dam.
Since the 1930s, U.S. Route 93 ran right along the top of the dam; however, the two-lane highway was hazardous and had grown increasingly congested over the years. In an effort to remedy these problems, construction began on a dam bypass bridge in 2005. Completed five years later, the Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge measures 1,905 feet long and soars nearly 900 feet above the Colorado River, making it the longest single-span concrete arch bridge in the Western Hemisphere as well as the second-highest bridge of any type in America. The structure, which cost $114 million, is named for Donal Neil “Mike” O’Callaghan, a Korean War veteran and two-term Nevada governor during the 1970s, and Pat Tillman, who gave up a professional football career with the Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the Army in 2002; he died in Afghanistan in 2004.During World War II, the dam was the target of a German bomb plot.
During World War II, the dam was the target of a German bomb plot.
In November 1939, with World War II underway, U.S. officials found out about an alleged plot by German agents to bomb Hoover Dam, by planting bombs at the intake towers to sabotage the power supply to Southern California’s aviation manufacturing industry. After American authorities learned of the plot, private boats were prohibited in the Black Canyon, stricter regulations for dam employees and visitors were enacted and a variety of other security measures such as physical barriers and increased lighting were put in place. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the dam was closed to visitors for the rest of the war. The dam had its own police force but the Army provided some personnel to help guard the dam. Additionally, government officials investigated various possibilities for protecting the dam from an aerial attack, such as large-scale smoke screens or the construction of a decoy dam, but none of these options were used. Hoover Dam reopened to the general public in September 1945.It once was the Earth’s tallest dam.
It once was the Earth’s tallest dam.
Rising 726.4 feet, Hoover Dam was the world’s tallest dam when it was built in the 1930s. These days, it’s the second-tallest dam in the U.S., having been surpassed by the 770-foot-high Oroville Dam in Northern California in 1968. The globe’s tallest dam is the 1,001-foot-high Jinping-I Dam in Liangshan, Sichuan, China, which became operational in 2013.
Hoover Dam’s power plant was the world’s largest hydroelectric station from 1939 to 1949. It has an installed capacity of 2,080 megawatts (MW) and currently generates around 4 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of hydroelectric power annually, for homes and business in Nevada, Arizona and California. China’s Three Gorges Dam, which started generating electricity in 2003 and became fully functional nine years later, is considered the planet’s largest hydroelectric dam, with a capacity of 22,500 megawatts. In 2014, Three Gorges broke the global record for annual hydroelectric power production, generating 98.8 billion KWh of electricity. The biggest hydropower producer in the U.S., Washington State’s Grand Coulee Dam, completed in 1941 (a third power station was added in 1974), has a capacity of 6,809 MW and generates about 21 billion kWh of electricity each year.No one was buried alive in the concrete.
No one was buried alive in the concrete.
Building the dam was too expensive for one company to tackle alone during the Great Depression, so a group of construction firms banded together and, using the name Six Companies, submitted a winning bid of $48.8 million for the project (at the time, it was the largest contract awarded by the federal government). A total of 21,000 men worked on the dam; an average of 3,500 each day, with the daily figure peaking at more than 5,200 in June 1934. When it came to hiring, the contractor was supposed to give preference to veterans of the Spanish-American War and World War I. Six Companies was contractually prohibited from hiring “Mongolian,” or Chinese workers, and while government officials pledged to help ensure that African Americans be employed on the project, the actual amount of black workers hired proved miniscule. A small number of Native Americans were hired as high scalers, responsible for removing loose rock from the canyon walls with jackhammers and dynamite, while suspended from ropes, in preparation for the dam’s construction.
Building the dam was tough, dangerous work, for which men were paid an hourly wage ranging from 50 cents to $1.25. Officially, the project had 96 construction-related fatalities —from such causes as falling rocks and run-ins with heavy equipment—but some sources contend the number likely was higher. Some 4.3 million cubic yards of concrete were used to build the dam, its power plant and auxiliary features, enough concrete to pave a 16-foot-wide, 8-inch-thick road from San Francisco to New York City, according to the Bureau of Reclamation. Contrary to popular myth, no workers were buried alive in the dam’s concrete as it was poured.Hoover Dam created America’s largest reservoir.
Hoover Dam created America’s largest reservoir.
Formed by the damning of the Colorado River, Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, covers about 248 square miles and is capable of holding some 28.9 million acre-feet of water (an acre-foot is equivalent to about 325,000 gallons). The creation of Lake Mead (named for Elwood Mead, commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation when the dam was being planned and built) flooded the community of St. Thomas, Nevada, and turned it into a ghost town. The last resident of the town, which was settled by Mormon pioneers in 1865, rowed away from his home in 1938. Today, the reservoir supplies water to farms, businesses and millions of people in Nevada, Arizona, California and Mexico. Lake Mead also is a popular site for boating, fishing and swimming; America’s first national recreation area was established there in 1964.Today, as a result of a drought the Colorado River basin has experienced for the past decade-and-a-half, Lake Mead has dropped to its lowest level since it was first filled in the 1930s.An entire city was created for people working on the dam.
An entire city was created for people working on the dam.
In the early 1930s, Boulder City, Nevada, was constructed to house 5,000 dam project workers. Before the city was built, many jobless men and their families who’d converged on the dam site, hoping to find employment in the midst of the Great Depression, had lived in squatters’ settlements. Boulder City was situated on federally owned land and had no elected officials. The city was run by an employee of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (the agency responsible for the dam project), who had the authority to evict residents as he saw fit. Among the local rules, alcohol and gambling were banned. The Boulder Dam Hotel was erected to host dignitaries coming to see the dam’s construction; famous figures from Bette Davis to the future Pope Pius XII visited in the 1930s. After nearly 30 years, the federal government relinquished control of Boulder City, which was incorporated in 1960.
The dam’s name was a source of controversy.
The dam’s name was a source of controversy.
Surveyors originally recommended the dam be constructed at Boulder Canyon, leading the initiative to be called the Boulder Canyon Dam Project. Even when Black Canyon later was deemed a better location for the new structure, it continued to be referred to as the Boulder Dam. However, on September 17, 1930, at a ceremony in Nevada to mark the start of construction on a railroad line to the dam site, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur announced the dam would be named for his boss, President Herbert Hoover, who had been inaugurated in 1929. In 1933, Hoover was succeeded in the White House by Franklin Roosevelt, and the new secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, no fan of Hoover, declared the structure would once again be called Boulder Dam. By that point, the name Herbert Hoover also had taken on negative associations for a number of Americans, who blamed him for the Great Depression.
In the ensuing years, Hoover Dam and Boulder Dam were used “interchangeably, the preference often depending on the political leanings of the speaker,” according to Michael Hiltzik, author of “Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century.” Finally, in April 1947, President Harry Truman approved a congressional resolution that officially confirmed the dam would carry Hoover’s name.
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